love how the only facebook comment under the article is a fake "make money from home" bot
It makes me wonder just how much damage these influence campaigns do. For instance, if Russia spent $100k in FB ads to reach ~140 million people[1](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/04/18/w...), how much of that "reach" translates into votes? I'd like to think people aren't as dumb as people think.
It's not really about people being smart or dumb. There's evidence that marketing and advertisements create sentiment, even if you don't believe in what the ads say. It's just the way our human brains work. And these entities are, if I had to bet, putting a lot of money towards getting people to believe certain things and act in certain ways without them explicitly knowing that they're being influenced.